If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Benchmarks Of AMD's Newest Gallium3D Driver

11-22-2010, 02:50 PM

Phoronix: Benchmarks Of AMD's Newest Gallium3D Driver

While we have already published two exciting articles today looking at the native ZFS file-system for Linux and also new benchmarks of OpenSolaris / BSD / Linux, here's a third article for the day. We might as well test our new Phoronix serving infrastructure while already having excess load today due to Slashdot, etc (it's good practice for OpenBenchmarking.org), so here are benchmarks of AMD's newest Gallium3D driver compared to their classic open-source Mesa driver and also their proprietary Catalyst driver. Oh yeah, a fourth article is also in the queue for today or the very near future when AMD has a major Linux driver announcement to share.

Comment

With just a few months of development, ATI R600 Gallium Driver is already faster than R600c driver in most games tested here... Although its 3D perfomance today is still far, far away from what Catalyst can do, it is interesting to know 3D perfomance is improving steadily in Mesa.

Btw, I'll also give a try to R600g when it becomes in a more or less "working" status... even if its 3D perfomance still needs a lot of catch up until have the same performance as Catalyst. (I'm interested in its video decoding acceleration capabilities...)

Comment

I can pretty much confirm that it is stable and working nicely. I've been running it for about a month and I only have one issue: the notifications in Ubuntu are not rounded and shaded.
Although I've got to tell you that I pretty much only use Compiz as I don't get hardware acceleration in commercial mesh generation software IcemCFD. That is a big pain and I don't know why is that as it is not supposed to use anything above OpenGL 2.1. Maybe this driver is not recognised as supported or it is blacklisted?

Can't wait to have h264 decoding support!

Dave, Jerome and the others working on this driver are awesome! Thank you so much guys! I hope AMD will switch to this driver soon. The next round of Fusion parts should get Gallium-only support in my opinion.

Comment

Those are pretty awesome results given the short time devs have had to work with the code. Bodes well for future card generations.

Given the decent FPS numbers at lower resolutions, IMO it would be interesting to have tests run on netbooks/sub-notebooks. They do tend to ship with lower grade GPUs, though I'm under the impression that extrapolating the performance delta between fglrx/OSS across GPU incarnations is tough (as in OSS drivers not scaling that well yet).

I have the feeling Gallium3D drivers have reached the "good enough" stage for those machines, at least performance-wise.